Thursday, February 14, 2013

Mosquitos and turtles: how to fund great education projects

I was first
up to speak, after the Minister, at NESTA, that’s Nick Hurd, the Minister for
Civil Society (they’ve lost the Big Society as it turned out to be so minuscule it fell out of the policy briefcase and no one can now find it). He looks
uncannily like George Osborne, not surprising, as he’s yet another Eton,
Bullington boy, and made a couple of interesting points and announcements. 1) Public sector risk averse but
can't now afford to be. Needs infrastructure of support 2) Social Innovation Camp will support up
to 72 tech based social ventures. Wayra Ultd will support 30 digitally focused
start-ups. Was he sincere? I doubt it – he left early.

Geek talk

The room was rammed, not even standing room,
and we had some excellent case studies of ‘social good’ projects in health,
local government and coding, also some interesting views from investors. It was
all good stuff and I applaud everyone in that room, as they’re actually DOING
STUFF.

But the danger in these events is in settling
into a sort of London luv-in. As soon as I hear the words ‘geek’ or ‘hackathon’
I reach, like Goebbels, for my gun, as I know I’ve entered the dated world of techy-yesteryear.
I bumped into my old Head of Programing, Brian Rodway, on the train back to
Brighton, he works for a games company that made £35 million profit last year –
don’t call him a geek. He hates the ghettoization of coders and coding.

Mosquitos & turtles

I’m here because I have a foot in both camps:
private and public sector. I’ve run, helped and invested in private sector
companies but, having cashed-in, I turned my attention to do some public good
in the education sector in a large charity.

Let’s start with a distinction. First,
there’s what I call MOSQUITO projects, that sound buzzy but lack leadership,
real substance, scalability and sustainability, and they’re short-lived, often
dying as soon as the funding runs out or academic paper is published. Then
there’s TURTLES, sometimes duller but with substance, scalability and
sustainability, and they’re long-lived. With any luck they’ll be around for
decades.

So, what’s a funder like NESTA, Nominet,
Education Foundation, Omidyar or UFI to do? First avoid creating large pools of
cash that breed mosquito projects with open calls and long-winded application
processes, Second, don’t just open your doors and windows to mosquito bids, go
looking for turtles – they’re more secretive and bury their eggs in the dark –
but they’re there. Be selective.

Note that MOSQUITO projects need not be
small, they can be huge AND short-lived. Molenet, NHSU, BBC Jam, many JISC and
EU projects (not all) in online learning, are largely mosquito projects. Doomed
to succeed in funding but fail in execution.

Crossing the chasm

My point was that crossing the chasm requires
some characteristics that are often missing in public sector funding in the
education market. Too many projects fail to cross the chasm as they lack the
four Ss.:

Senior management team

Sales & marketing

Scalability

Sustainability

There are two dangers here. First,
understimulating the market so that the mosquito projects fall into the gap as
they fail to find customers and revenues. This is rarely to do with a lack of
technical or coding skills but far more often a paucity of management, sales
and marketing skills.

The other danger is overstimulating the
market with large projects that stop real innovative projects from evolving and
bridging the gap. The danger here is that the large dollops of cash go into too
much product development and not enough market development.

There’s another danger and that’s bogging
projects down in overlong academic research, where one must go at the glacial
speed of the academic year and not the market. These projects lose momentum,
focus and, in any case, no one pays much attention to the results. As the old
saying goes, “When you want to move a
graveyard, don’t expect much help from the occupants.”

Either way a serious problem is the lack of
strategic thinking and a coherent set of sales and marketing actions. When
people think of ‘scale’ they think of technical scale, but that goes without
saying on the web, it’s a given. What projects need is market scale. What is
your addressable market? Let’s take an example – schools. Where are the
budgets? Who are the buyers? Who will you actually sell to? How big is the
market? Do you realise that Scotland has a different curriculum? What market
share do you expect? Who are your competitors? Answer these questions and you
may very well decide to find a proper job.

We need to distinguish between noise and
hard-nosed reality. Ghettoising social good through abstruse language and
labels is not the point. You can call it ‘Impact funding’, but what’s needed is
evidence of impact. Targeted funding and real impact is the point. One sign of
the ghettoization, is that despite the fact that I invited the audience, at the
start of my talk, to speak to me afterwards, as I’m a Trustee in a charity with
£50 million to spent on tech projects, not one person came up to me and asked
me for my card. When you network, speak to people you don’t know, not the
people you know. That was a missed ‘sales’ opportunity for many in the room. It
may be the case, and I’m not saying I’m certain here, that sales and marketing
courses is what’s needed, not geekfests and hackathons.

Conclusion

I have to congratulate Katie and the folks at
NESTA for organising the event. There’s a lot of energy, talent and entrepreneurial
spirit around. There’s also some great people around in NESTA, Nominet Trust and
other agencies. There just has to be a more efficient way of speed dating
companies and investors to make things happen a little faster. Finally, I
apologise of anyone feels that I’m completely off the page here, but I was
asked to give my opinion based on my personal experience and that’s what I did. I've focused on the potential problems as that's what we need to avoid.

2 Comments:

I really enjoyed your tweets from this talk Donald. I agree whole-heartedly with the argument that business savvy and selling skills are so very much needed to get even a very good idea to market.

It is interesting though that we are still focusing on getting more kids into "coding". Where are our entrepreneurial or business Dojos? Surely we are missing something here and need to strike a balance.

I really enjoyed your tweets from this talk Donald. I agree whole-heartedly with the argument that business savvy and selling skills are so very much needed to get even a very good idea to market.

It is interesting though that we are still focusing on getting more kids into "coding". Where are our entrepreneurial or business Dojos? Surely we are missing something here and need to strike a balance.